My baby girl...

I saw an idea on pinterest that I just had to do... Will Bella use it in the future? I guess that is up to her, but the idea was to take a picture of your daughter in your wedding dress and then have it displayed at her wedding... Sounds adorable right? I thought so, so we busted out my wedding dress and snapped a few pictures. Hopefully I will be able to find them when the time comes and remember that I thought this idea was cute! Side note: mom had to try it on at least once while we had it out and with my recent weight losses, it once again fit and WAS TOO BIG!! Can you tell mom was super excited about this?? Yep, I was! But, to keep the focus on Bella - isn't she a doll? Of course she is!

One last snowman...

It seems unthinkable that I should be saying that we built this snowman in April, but that is exactly what happened this year! Yikes!! It was a very long winter and it seems that we are at the tail end of it... Crossing my fingers that there will be no more pictures of snowman any time soon! This was a beautiful sticky snow, but didn't roll very well, so here is our mini snowman that the kids were ecstatic to make!

St. Louis

Taking dad up on his offer of plane tickets to go and visit Rusty was a great way to spend a long weekend in April! We headed out and spent 4 kid free days hanging out, checking out local breweries, pubs and wineries, taking in a stadium tour and just spending time together. It was a lot of fun and I was super glad that we were able to do it!

New partner...

Since the whole diaper changing thing is getting a little old, I've decided to train in a new partner for my daycare. All the babies in diapers better be a little worried! :) Oh, wait... does that mean he changes his own? Hmmmm....

Home improvements

We have been working hard on the house, doing a few things here and there to fix things up and make it a little more modern... I started stripping the wood paneling off of one section of the kitchen and repainting it. Never mind the mismatching white paints - it isn't noticeable on the wall but you sure can tell in the pictures! Whoops! :) Oh well, Josh wants to texture the bottom half since it wasn't textured underneath, so I guess I will be repainting at some point anyhow!

Before (Pay no attention to the crooked pictures... It's a never ending battle!)

After


We also decided to tackle the 70's FLOWERED wallpaper that I have hated since we moved in... Josh got the fun job of painting the huge wall that goes up our split level staircase, because I was not going there at all. It is amazing how fresh and modern it looks with a coat of paint! So excited!!

Before

After


After a hard two days of working on the entryway!

Egg Hunt

Our Easter Egg Hunt this year was a little entertaining due to the amount of snow and melting that we still had going on. We had to move it from our normal spot at the park and head over to the school. The kids still managed to have a great time and good thing that dad remembered the snowpants and boots, because the water was deep in a few areas! Notice how much Braxton LOVED the Easter Bunny! :)

Easter Eggs!

It's so fun to see the way that the kids are becoming more and more creative as they get older... This definitely shows up during Easter when it is time to bust out the Easter eggs. I love watching them try to draw, color, dip in different ways and try to copy the things that Josh and I do with the eggs. What great family time and memories!

New friend!

We have a new family that has moved into town and we have loved getting to hang out with them and getting to know them. They have 2 boys that are around Bella and Braxton's ages and just had a beautiful baby girl! Craig came over for a playdate (or a mom/dad break as we NEED to call it) in hopes that the kids would go play and we could visit. As you can tell in the pictures where his boys are nonexistent, this worked really well for him. Me? Not so much since my children showed that they were a little BABY obsessed! Georgi definitely has a place in our family's hearts!

Cub Scout Space Derby

Brody had a lot of fun at the space derby. His ship ended up being pretty fast and he placed 1st in his grade level. He then got to go against two of his cousins that each won their division, where he came in 2nd. It is a LONG night of space derbying but he enjoyed having a winning vehicle!